I woke out of bed about a month ago and got up to start scribbling notes, much to the confusion of my wife who asked several times "What are you doing?". Apparently I never did give her a good answer because she asked the same thing the next morning. :-)

The Dream

I have a dream, or vision if you prefer, of a website where our missionaries can gather and discuss their ministries, encourage, edify and generally benefit from each other. I've spent a lot of time in the last year going over the ideas in my head about how it would look, what way to get it ramped up, how it would affect the FIM culture, what would draw people to the site and about every angle I can think of. I've also spent a lot of time listening to various Geeks and God drupal episodes as well as many Lullabot Podcast episodes to understand how good drupaly minds think. Drupal is my tool of choice for this.

I've come to the conclusion that one of the hardest elements of developing this new community is the first one that must be tackled. Drupal does a great job of crafting a community-based site, but we also need to include the features from out current site. Despite drupal's vast module collection, not one module actually fits our needs in this area. Consequently, I'm looking at developing it myself. The good news, many current drupal modules could fit into the works, improve the module and shorten the development time.

The Plan

I'm a firm believer in planning. If something isn't planned out and discussed from various angles, it probably isn't going to fly or will do so badly. It's the state of flying badly that scares me. When something has to fly despite having its wings clipped it becomes a real disaster, not just a failed experiment. This particular plan doesn't have the option of failing, so it either succeeds or becomes the ugly flightless bird that everyone follows along its path and throws into the air because it needs to get somewhere and can't on its own. You've probably seen poorly planned implementations that suffer from this ailment.

The Review

In the interest of being more like a beautiful lorikeet pictured in this post, I've spent the last month studying drupal and its modules. Drafting out ideas for the interface, writing down questions that I need to answer, looking up answers, pitching the dream to our leadership and finally I've submitted the idea of this module to groups.drupal.org's Contributed Module Ideas group looking for some review and advice on my concept. I'm happy to report that the idea I had for this modules structure has changed dramatically from the first draft when I rose in the middle of the night. Hopefully, more review will only further tweak my ideas.

Feel free to submit your own impressions if you have some here in the comments or over an the Drupal Groups page.